His research focuses on efficient high-quality rendering, signal processing techniques for computer graphics, data-driven modeling and animation, and point-based methods.

Before coming to UMD, Zwicker was a professor at the University of Bern and head of the Computer Graphics Group at the Institute of Computer Science. From 2003 to 2006 he was a postdoctoral associate with the computer graphics group at MIT, and then held a position as an assistant professor at the University of California in San Diego from 2006 to 2008.

Zwicker has served as a papers co-chair and conference chair of the IEEE/Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics and as a papers co-chair for Eurographics 2010. He has also been a member of program committees for various conferences including ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics.

He has served as an associate editor for journals such as the Computer Graphics Forum and the Visual Computer.